I don't bother with stroke order in the slightest. I'm not being graded on anything and study on my own 90% of the time. I primarily study characters to be able to read, but a secondary bonus is being able to pick the right character out from a 拼音输入法。 Most Chinese will pick up your meaning even if you use the wrong characters in one or two places, in fact it has become super common among high school and college kids to purposely put the wrong characters in places like 么 instead of 吗 etc...But it is nice to be able to type properly :).

Stroke order in some cases does allow you to write the character more easily so it looks neat and clean, but I've found in many cases it actually slows down my writing speed.